We, as gamers, are a passionate bunch. We spend as much time as possible embracing our hobby. Naturally, after years of enjoying our favorites, a new generation has emerged. We want to share our beloved pastime with friends and family, but we often struggle to make the introduction smooth and the results are not as fulfilling as we had dreamed. How can we teach our kids, nieces and nephews, and younger friends to enjoy the same worlds we have enjoyed for decades? Continue reading Gaming – The Next Generation, part 1

We are finally finished with all but one of our holiday gatherings and are gearing up to wind down for the upcoming vacations and our Christmas tradidion of seeing a movie and spending time with our furry kids. Been saving Hobbit 2 for this event.

In company news we have a bit of a mixed bag. My hopes for an October and then a December release of the Infinite Dungeon have both been dashed and replaced with an early 2014 timeline. The debris from the collapse of Castle Nystul is still gumming up the works and the artwork from Jeff continues to be delayed. In addition, the promised ashcans for the backers (the ID without art and layout) were delayed as well as a bit of needed content was found to not exist and thus had to be written in. This last bit has been completed and I am now putting the ashcans together for release this week.

In other news, we will be releasing a new pdf for the Kamarathin setting detailing the use of herbs, poisons and general healing rules. It was written by Paul Caughell and was supposed to be part of a larger collection dealing with magic within Kamarathin, but ourselves and Paul decided to just go ahead and release it as a standalone since Kamarathin development has been put to the side for now. Even still, there is rumblings of a full blown re-release of the main book with professional layout, more and different art and cleaned up 6E conversions and a possible Pathfinder rules variant.

We currently have a crop of 4 or 5 Tangents, all have been edited, and are awaiting layout before I can release them. The System Crash: Ragnarok tangent that was made for Aethercon is excellent and Curtis Baum and I are talking about making this one available for general sale as well.

Now, on to more general business. D3 Adventures is both my hobby and my business. However, it isn’t making enough income to support me and hasn’t been for a while now. Sales just aren’t where I would like them. We’ve been running this company for seven years and it is time to make a decision. That decision is to move D3 Adventures back into the hobby slot. We’ll still continue to release titles but were going to focus on smaller, quicker releases such as Tangents and the upcoming Campaign Toybox lines.

I will still be working on the Irshaanic Confluence setting in my spare time and when we have it to a point where I think we’re ready for a final push to get it published, we’ll start a Kickstarter campaign to get the remaining funds needed for art and layout.

The release of Infinite Dungeon to its backers will not be affected. Those funds and plans are still in place. This may affect future releases of it, however. The initail plan was to continue the releases of the ID with proceeds from sales of the first and do minor Kickstarters to supplement those funds, if anything, just to complete the set of 6-7 books. For now, we’re going to go into a ‘wait and see’ mode. If sales of the Infinite Dungeon (other than the original backers of course) show interest and are significant enough, then we’ll revisit it and build book 2 of this rather interesting setting. If this does happen, I will likely recruit Mark Carroll to lead that project if his time is available.

On a personal note, I have long resisted the ravening hordes of the D20/3.x/Pathfinder fan base and have managed to avoid playing those systems other than a poorly executed three games of 3.0 when it first came out. I stuck to my Rolemaster homebrew and Hero System. This also coincided with a decades long gamemastering stint where I almost never played an RPG as an actual player. I think I lost something during that time. My games became more and more restrictive as I continued to cling to my niche systems and made life fairly miserable for my players as they tried to hurt my Precious. I became one of “those” GM’s and only recently realized it. In fact, the Kamarathin setting shows both sides of my best and worst qualities as it was released when I was at my “worst” GM attitude but my “best” creative writing.

I’ve decided to stop GMing, almost entirely, for the time being and have taken up the mantle as a player once more. Diving headlong into this endeavor, I have joined a Pathfinder campaign run by our own Joe Davis (creator of the Campaign Toybox line and the Pathfinder Rulesmaster for the Irshaanic Confluence setting). I’m actually quite nervous, it’s been fully 20 years since I last actually played in a campaign and at least 7 years since I’ve done any actual face-to-face gaming of any real significance.

Meanwhile, I need to make a living. So I’ve acquired a part-time gig with Enterprise that will supply a steady income, is completely brainless and is a physical job that gets me out of my office chair and into the outside world. In addition, I’ve started another venture by turning another hobby into a business; On Target Training. OTT is something I’ve always wanted to do; teach firearms safety and use to new hobbyists and provide a place where more moderate and left of center folks can get together to enjoy the shooting hobby without having to listen to extreme rhetoric.

So, in summary, ID is delayed until next year. More Tangents are on the way. A new Kamarathin release is coming. The Campaign Toybox line is still being written and will be released when Joe has enough releases staged for a 6 month lead. D3 is moving to the background professionally speaking. On Target Training is moving to forefront. I’m putting down the GM hat and donning my spear and magic helmet.

2014 is shaping up to be an interesting and ideally more lucrative and productive year on all fronts.

Like this:

Hello all, sorry for the late DD; it’s been a hectic couple of weeks on other projects. But as promised I have some ID news.

Production-wise, still waiting on art from Jeff and still on schedule for October.

In November we are turning Aethercon into a coming out party. We will have a Q&A Panel with myself and author Mark Carroll. We are working on getting Line Developer Ross Isaacs, Lead Artist Jeff Laubenstein and author Owen Stephens on the panel as well.

After the panel we will have several GM’s running games in the Infinite Dungeon.

And that’s where we stand. We’re in a hurry up and wait situation as we wait for the art and layout.